Filmmaker Offering $5,000 Reward After Laptop Bag Stolen

DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – A Texas filmmaker is offering a $5,000 reward for the return of stolen hard drives containing footage for an upcoming documentary.

Will Bakke says he was staying with a friend in Northwest Dallas last Thursday when a man broke into his car.

The thief – captured by a neighbor’s camera – took a laptop bag with a computer and the hard drives inside.

laptop bag thief

Bakke says he’s not interested in pressing charges and doesn’t care about any of the stolen items but the hard drives.

“Unfortunately, we lost all the footage for this movie we’d been working on,” says Bakke.

The film is called “Kyle Goes to Prom,” and it tells the story about a group of friends from Texas A&M planning a surprise bucket-list road trip for a wheelchair-bound friend afflicted with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Bakke says the hard drives are not normally together; but on that day, they were.

“It was a rare occasion where our backup hard drives happen to be in the same place,” Bakke says. “We were changing footage over that day.”

And therefore, with the footage gone, so is the film.

“It’s a newer version of the Western Digital hard drive. There are four black hard drives inside a black zip-up pouch that has the word ‘Avant’ on it. And it was last seen inside of a tan Filson bag.”

Bakke says getting those hard drives back is all he wants. “We don’t even care about the laptop. We don’t care about the bag. We just care about the kid’s story. So we are not looking to prosecute. We’re even offering a reward of $5000 for anyone who can help us get back these hard drives just so that we can tell this kid’s story.”

Anyone with leads or other help in the search can contact Will Bakke and Michael B. Alen directly via will@riotstudios.com or 214.202.0955